Since the receipt of your last letter to Dr Johnston,1 I cannot help thinking continually about you and
the—complicated disorders your letter reported.2 And so,—though
I have nothing else to write about,—I loc_vm.02200.jpg want to send you a line or two again to express my loving
sympathy with you and my best wishes. I hope that you are better than when you
wrote, & I am anxious to hear a better report.
After about a fortnight's frost, we have had today a heavy fall of snow. The young
moon shines brightly tonight, & loc_vm.02201.jpg it is again freezing. It seems likely that we shall have an
"old-fashioned" (frosty) Christmas.
The weather is very different to that in which Dr Johnston
visited you,3 and I try to imagine you—in these short, dark days—confined
to the room which Dr J's description & photographs4 loc_vm.02202.jpg have made so
familiar—solitary and ill—It reminds me of my mother's5 condition in her
last years—lame, suffering & much
alone—and my heart goes out to you like a son's.
But, as circumstances darkened, she herself only seemed to grow sweeter and more
loveable,—more loc_vm.02203.jpg
loving, tender & self-forgetting and her faith deeper and brighter. And I,
too, learned to love her more & more.
Day by day your influence is spreading, and new friends are learning to appreciate
and to love you, with grateful reverence, and a personal affection such as no one loc_vm.02204.jpg ever aroused
before.—I am deeply grateful that I, for one, am—privileged to write to
you, and to act as spokesman for an increasing multitude of others who are not so
privileged, but who, like myself, will think of you at this season with loving
good-will and tender sympathy. God bless you & all your household
Correspondent:
James William Wallace
(1853–1926), of Bolton, England, was an architect and great admirer of
Whitman. Wallace, along with Dr. John Johnston (1852–1927), a physician in
Bolton, founded the "Bolton College" of English admirers of the poet. Johnston
and Wallace corresponded with Whitman and with Horace Traubel and other members
of the Whitman circle in the United States, and they separately visited the poet
and published memoirs of their trips in John Johnston and James William Wallace,
Visits to Walt Whitman in 1890–1891 by Two
Lancashire Friends (London: Allen and Unwin, 1917). For more
information on Wallace, see Larry D. Griffin, "Wallace, James William (1853–1926)," Walt
Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1998).